I appreciate Michelle Tsai, the “Explainer” last week at Slate, attempting to explain how and why the late former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner became an unlikely gay icon. Tsai attributes it to Tammy Faye’s “perseverance” and her “unique style.” It also helped that she talked about AIDS before it was popular for conservatives to do so and that she ultimately befriended the gay community.

But, to me, that sells the gay community a little short. Randy Shulman, an editor of a gay newsweekly in Washington, D.C., told Neda Ulaby of NPR a few years back that Messner falls into “a tradition of divas in distress who aggressively market themselves to gay men.”

While I wouldn’t be that cynical — and testimonies abound to the genuineness of Messner’s compassion and connection to the gay community later in her life — I do think that her appeal is a little more complicated … and problematic.

The commenters on the article, in fact, do a great job of pointing out the reductive nature of Tsai’s piece. Many of them are offended by the very concept of a “gay icon” — asserting that any assertion of a unified “gay culture” with identical tastes is based more on stereotypes than reality.

But ecoX84 has the most enlightening point:

Women like Tammy Faye and Liza Minnelli become “gay icons” because their larger-than-life femininity draws attention to gender as a performance. Their representation of self is so over the top that it begs imitation from drag queens, and when a drag queen performs Tammy Faye, femininity is exposed as a construction that can be performed by anyone.

In that sense, Tammy Faye is adored less for her own personality and beliefs and more for her initially unwitting intervention into a world of rigid gender expectations.

That’s not to say that some members of the gay community didn’t make a personal connection with her — although many others probably were never able to get over her connections with the evangelical movement that has, quite literally, demonized them.

Looking at the broader cultural context of her appeal, however, it’s important to make the distinction between the performance and the person.